When shouldn't I program in Perl?

When your manager forbids it--but do consider replacing them :-).

Actually, one good reason is when you already have an existing application written in another language that's all done (and done well), or you have an application language specifically designed for a certain task (e.g. prolog, make).

For various reasons, Perl is probably not well-suited for real-time embedded systems, low-level operating systems development work like device drivers or context-switching code, complex multithreaded shared-memory applications, or extremely large applications. You'll notice that perl is not itself written in Perl.

The new native-code compiler for Perl may reduce the limitations given in the previous statement to some degree, but understand that Perl remains fundamentally a dynamically typed language, and not a statically typed one. You certainly won't be chastized if you don't trust nuclear-plant or brain-surgery monitoring codes to it. And Larry will sleep easier, too--Wall Street programs not withstanding. :-)